


There’s always a sequel: post-watching notes for 14x04

by dimplesofdiscontent



Series: Season 14 Meta [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: 13x05, 14x04, Meta, Season/Series 14, Season/Series 14 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-23
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2019-09-25 06:00:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17115767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dimplesofdiscontent/pseuds/dimplesofdiscontent
Summary: Notes and analysis of Supernatural episode 14x04, "Mint Condition." Originally posted on Tumblr on November 1, 2018.Tumblr Tags: watching notes for later, 14x04, 14x04 meta, meta adjacent, livewatching, doubles and mirrors, villains as exposition, possession narrative, past canon, 13x05, michael!dean, thelma and louise, bert and ernie, fandom problems, davy perez appreciation, singular vs plural, brothers winchester, brother feels, front seat feelings, I loved this so much, so many feelings, season what you want 14, death by spn writers' room





	There’s always a sequel: post-watching notes for 14x04

## There’s always a sequel: post-watching notes for 14x04

AHHHHHHHHH!!! I LOVE THIS EPISODE!!! I may never be over how much I enjoyed it, not least because I was eating pizza and drinking beer while watching it just like my dear nerd Dean Winchester. Anyway, I’m sure most people are going to hit the big ones right away but just so I know what I might want to return to:

  1. This was Mirrors 101, as others have said elsewhere, since the Sam mirror was actually  _named_  “Sam” and the Dean mirror was named “Dirk,” in outfits that were so Salmon Dean letter-perfect that we had been speculating that they were  _cosplaying_  as Sam and Dean. Oh, and the Cas mirror was unconscious for most of the episode. 
  2. Little Dean Mirror was so cute and so brave and, in a way, the kind of kid/young man that Dean never allowed himself to be. It was so sweet to see them together and I loved their interactions. I especially enjoyed him stepping up to defend his friend the Cas mirror and saying, “He’s my friend. He’s  _our_  friend” to show that Davy knew exactly what he was doing when he FREAKING WROTE 12X12 and had Cas say “I love you. I love all of you.” Davy was like “Hey, just in case you were thinking that this wasn’t being used to make a meaningful distinction, here it is in another iteration to show you that it means singular vs. plural and, what’s more, that it’s about Dean and Cas.” Brilliant.
  3. Davy’s repeated dragging a certain corner of the fandom was actually one of the best parts of the whole episode. From “the Internet…where everyone can be a dick” to the Sam n Dean convo about costumes where Sam’s face told us all about what they think of the idea of them in  _couples’ costumes_ it was just so delicious. Also, the bad Yelp review that they got for a stupid argument about who might or might not beat up Superman? That was a great parody of the kind of online fandom drama that can happen. *hat tip*
  4. I want a separate number for Sam’s face as they discuss things that are, and are not, couples’ costumes. Dean is reasonable enough to recognize that Bert and Ernie would be “weird” (AHHHHH SO MUCH VINDICATION!!) because they are brothers, but he ends by suggesting Thelma and Louise! Not only does Sam’s face convey that “oh God, Dean has fundamentally misunderstood  _Thelma and Louise_  and somehow Doesn’t Know the subtext” (actually the queerness of that movie isn’t even subtext but let’s be generous to Dean here), but it also tells us a little about how he might feel about this as an ending for them. Sam didn’t look too enthused at the idea, even aside from him clearly thinking of his brother in drag.  
  
Now, I don’t think Dean was serious in this suggestion about throwing the car into drive and hurling themselves off a cliff (no mention of the kiss…hmmm), but he’s been serious before both in the scene where he actually mentions  _Thelma and Louise_  (the one with the thick, leaden Deancas sexual tension) and in S7 when Cas was dead and he threatened to drive himself and his “beautiful mind brother” off a cliff. This is a response that Dean has when things get Really Bad and it’s also, not coincidentally, an ending that Jared and Jensen have talked about for the show, though they too have generally moved away from it. To suggest it to Sam in a playful way is still slightly concerning because of the valence that it has for Dean generally. 
  5. The intercut chase scene where we switch back and forth between the Final Girl vs. the movie slasher and the Dean Mirror vs. MOTW. It’s funny and clever and comments on  _commenting on_  cultural artifacts (the two guards watching the movie are exactly the wrong kind of viewers in so far as they are missing things that are happening in real life. These dudes think they’d be movie heroes and are happy to criticize the one they are watching but, actually, when the same thing is happening in their world they are just oblivious viewers who THINK they would be heroes; the real hero is actually an obsessive nerdy viewer who takes on the role instead of commenting on it. Love it. (I want to do more later with Dean as the Final Girl and what that role means within horror movies.)
  6. Ok, this is going to need expanding, but I want to relate this to 13x05 and I need some time but I think it’s worth it. 13x05 which, obviously, Perez knew well because it set up “Tombstone” and brought Cas back. It was also an episode that dealt with ghost possession in the wake of the death of one of a group of friends (two of whom were Dean and Cas mirrors). The ghost in that case was also a masked villain. The Dean mirror came back traumatized by his inability to save the Cas mirror (the Sam mirror didn’t even turn up to the haunted house) and then later, possessed by the ghost, returned to the scene of the haunting and died. Dean himself died in that episode and, even by the end, recounted his motivation being unable to save his mom, Cas, or even “a scared little kid.” He was clearly haunted by Cas’s death. Dean was prepared to let the ghost kill him in 13x05, making a surprised face when Sam stepped in to stop it and then doing the job himself. Dean in 14x04 was actually similarly braced for the axe until the Dean mirror (part of himself) stepped in to save him. That’s progress! Dean’s haunted in 14x04 too, by his own possession (which he says he’ll never be over), but it looks symbolically like he may be able to step in and save himself. 
  7. Obviously we’ve got yet another possession narrative going, which ties into this season’s overall theme/concern with possession and its aftereffects. Because, yeah, we know that Michael isn’t gone, just like we know that at the end of a horror movie when a Jason or a Michael Myers is killed he isn’t  _really_  dead. The reanimated dummy of the movie villain even shows us this at the end in the scene with the guard. It may look like the Winchesters took care of the possessing entity– “Is that it?” asked Sam and they said yes, just as they had said yes about Michael being vanished, but, well, what about the sequel?



All in all, I loved this and it was just SO much fun!! I’d like to do more with the titles and plots of the “All Saints’” films that Dean describes but I’ll need to rewatch for that. Hope you all had fun too!!


End file.
